Qur’anic Exegesis Between the Renewal of Reality and the Renewal of Tools: Artificial Intelligence as a Case Study

The researcher wishes to extend his sincere thanks and appreciation to the conference's organizing committee — the Knowledge Center for Research and Education in Malaysia, the College of Sharia and Islamic Studies at Qatar University, and the American Imams Academy — for the opportunity to take part in this scholarly gathering. He also wishes to record that preparing this paper alerted him to a broader research project he intends to pursue: a reference work on "the development of tafsīr through the tools of knowledge." That project is not confined to artificial intelligence alone, however much it advances; rather, it treats AI as a single link in the chain of the tools of renewal — neither a maker of tafsīr nor an independent agent in its movement. This paper is the seed of that project, and the researcher hopes it will meet, from the academic reviewing body, care, adoption, and ongoing attention to its development.

Introduction

Praise be to God, who sent down the Qur'an as guidance for mankind, and peace and blessings upon the one sent as a teacher and an expounder. To proceed: tafsīr has always been the bridge by which the Muslim community reaches an understanding of its Book — its yield renewed with the renewal of the questions of reality and the tools of knowledge, while the text and its decisive certainties remain fixed. In our age, artificial intelligence has emerged as a new tool of knowledge, and so the old question is renewed in a new guise: where does AI stand within the relationship between tafsīr and the tools of each era?

Because this question lies at the very core of the conference's theme — Islamic studies in the age of artificial intelligence — the paper adopts an analytical lens built on the duality of "the renewal of reality and the renewal of tools," treating artificial intelligence as an applied case of the renewal of tools. The paper's central contribution is methodological: to propose a method for reading the history of tafsīr through the tools of knowledge, in which the technical discussion of AI is an application and test of the method rather than its foundation. Originality here lies in the historical–epistemic method, not in the shifting technical particulars.

The paper proceeds through a preamble that lays down a procedural definition of renewal; then a section on the susceptibility of tafsīr to renewal; then a section on the patterns by which the tools of knowledge were assimilated across the ages (with a brief foundational chapter on the major shifts); then a third section — the heart of the paper — on the nature of AI and its epistemic and uṣūlī treatment; then a fourth section on the integrative framework with an applied illustrative case; and finally a conclusion and recommendations.

The Problem and Its Questions

The problem lies in the absence of a foundational reading that links artificial intelligence to the trajectory of the renewal of the tools of tafsīr, in place of fragmented technical treatments. Its questions are: What is the concept of exegetical renewal and its governing controls? How did tafsīr assimilate the tools of knowledge across its eras? Is AI an augmenting tool or a transformation in the structure of knowledge? What is the uṣūlī (foundational) criterion for accepting or rejecting its outputs? And what are the features of an integrative framework between the exegete and the machine?

Aims and Significance

The paper aims to ground the concept of renewal, to read the history of tafsīr through the tools of knowledge, to determine the place of AI within it, to build an uṣūlī criterion for its outputs, and to formulate an integrative framework that preserves the centrality of the exegete and foregrounds the educational dimension. Its significance lies in moving the discussion from the technical level to the epistemic–uṣūlī level, and in furnishing religious and educational institutions with a disciplined conception of the place of this new tool.

Prior Studies

The studies fall along several tracks: a track on renewal and the history of tafsīr (the Muhammadiyya League of Scholars and the Tafsīr Center for Qur'anic Studies); a technical track on natural-language processing in Qur'anic studies; and a regulating Sharia track. Among contemporary Arabic output connected to the conference's milieu: Resolution No. 258 (3/26) of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy concerning "Artificial Intelligence: Its Rulings and Controls," issued in Doha in 2025, in addition to the research of the Fatwa Academy and studies on hallucination and bias.

To affirm engagement with the global field, the paper draws on the literature of digital humanities and the philosophy of technology: Jerome McGann, in Radiant Textuality, examined the impact of digital media on the theory of the text and its interpretation; Johanna Drucker discussed the tension between the computational method and the humanistic approach; and Don Ihde founded "material hermeneutics" in the human–technology relationship, treating technology as an interpretive mediator. In the field of Explainable AI, the tension between faithfulness and plausibility in model outputs has been studied, and the faithfulness of generated Islamic content has been assessed through agent-based frameworks that link outputs to their sources.

These experiences are compared with efforts to digitize sacred texts in other traditions — such as digital biblical studies, Jewish-text platforms (Sefaria), and Talmud-indexing projects — while registering an essential difference: the digitization of texts in the Jewish and Christian traditions partly addresses the crisis of the absence of a connected chain of transmission, through the automated textual criticism of written manuscripts and the collation of their variants; whereas the mainstay of the Qur'an and its exegetical sciences is the connected oral isnād and the faculty acquired through reception and licensing (ijāza). This paper comes to unite history and technology in a single method whose strongest contribution is "reading tafsīr through the tools of knowledge."

Method and Limits

The paper adopts a historical–analytical–critical method: it surveys the patterns by which tafsīr assimilated the tools of knowledge, analyzes the central concepts, reads the nature of AI critically, and reinforces this with an applied illustrative case. Its limits are those natural to a conference paper: it is confined to tafsīr and the Qur'anic sciences insofar as they relate to the tools of knowledge; to AI insofar as its epistemic impact is concerned, not its engineering detail; and to an illustrative sample of three verses and a single named language model.

A frank statement of strengths and limitations: the historical evidence selected is representative, not exhaustive; it reveals a pattern and warrants a testable hypothesis, not a deterministic law. The applied case is a single illustrative indicator, not a basis for statistical generalization. These are limits appropriate to the scale of a conference paper, keeping the thesis balanced against its evidence.

Preamble: Tafsīr Between Fixity and Renewal

The Qur'an is the speech of God, preserved by His words: ﴾Indeed, it is We who sent down the Reminder, and indeed, We will be its guardian﴿ (al-Ḥijr: 9). By this its text is fixed, while people's understanding of it is renewed with the renewal of the tools of inquiry and the questions of reality. Tafsīr is thus a field in which the fixity of the source and its decisive certainties meet the changing of methods and angles of view; and this duality is one of the secrets of its remaining alive and ever-giving without any compromise of the text.

A Procedural Definition of Exegetical Renewal

By exegetical renewal is meant: the production of a new understanding of the fixed text through the assimilation of a newly arisen tool of knowledge, or in response to a new question of reality, while remaining connected to the foundations of derivation (uṣūl al-istinbāṭ) and without contradicting what is decisively established (al-qaṭʿī). To distinguish it from its neighbors: disagreement (ikhtilāf) is a horizontal multiplicity of opinions without any advance in the tool; development (taṭawwur) is a historical accumulation that is the vessel of renewal; and deviation (inḥirāf) is a departure from the foundations or a clash with the decisive under the banner of "renewal." The commentators on the hadith of renewal have established the concept as the revival of what had been effaced of the understanding of the Book and the Sunna — not the alteration of the foundations; and so the procedural definition here is a disciplined extension of the work of earlier scholars.

By this control, problematic issues are adjudicated — among them allusive (Sufi) interpretation: whatever of it accords with the apparent sense of the wording, does not clash with what is decisively established (muḥkam), and for which the wording bears a possibility, is an acceptable allusion under the heading of renewal — not an interpretation claimed to be the sole intended meaning; whereas whatever clashes with the apparent sense or the decisive, or claims exclusivity, is deviation. The control is one and the same, applied to old and new alike.

Section One: The Susceptibility of Tafsīr to Renewal

Linguistically, tafsīr derives from al-fasr, meaning unveiling and clarification. Technically, al-Zarkashī defined it as "a science by which the Book of God is understood, its meanings clarified, and its rulings and wisdoms extracted"; and Abū Ḥayyān defined it as "a science in which one investigates the manner of pronouncing the words of the Qur'an, their denotations, their individual and compositional rulings, and the meanings they bear in their compositional state" — a definition the researcher counts among the most comprehensive, for its inclusion of the wording, its denotation, its ruling, and its compositional meaning.

The one who reflects notes that these definitions establish tafsīr upon a renewable human act — understanding, clarification, and extraction — which vary with the variance of the understander's faculty and the tools of his age. Thus the susceptibility of tafsīr to renewal is inherent in its reality, not incidental to it. This is reinforced by the distinction between tafsīr and ta'wīl, since the door of weighing possibilities is open to renewed inquiry so long as it remains disciplined by the foundations.

The causes of renewal are three, intertwined: the renewal of events that pose new questions; the development of the sciences that supply tafsīr with tools; and the change of the tools of knowledge and their media — which is the axis of this paper. Here a precise distinction is required: there is a technical means that transmits and preserves without effect on understanding, and there is a tool of knowledge that mediates in the apprehension and ordering of meaning, thereby changing the way one reaches the text or thinks about it. By this criterion, logic, printing, and artificial intelligence are of the genus of tools of knowledge. The criterion of "the effective tool" is that it changes the way one reaches or organizes the text, or expands the exegete's processing capacity, or introduces a new angle of view — without any compromise of the text; and it is by this that AI is measured in Section Three.

Section Two: Patterns of Assimilating the Tools of Knowledge Across the Ages

What is intended is not a narration of history but an analysis of how tafsīr, in each phase, assimilated the new tool of knowledge. The figures cited are selected representative witnesses, not an exhaustive survey, and each pattern closes with the question: which tool did this phase assimilate?

The Narrative Pattern (the tool of transmission and isnād)

The point of evidence here is that, with al-Ṭabarī, weighing opinions (tarjīḥ) became a disciplined methodological craft governed by criteria, not a mere gathering of opinions. He marshals the transmitted reports with their chains, then renders his verdict with his customary formula: "And the most fitting of the opinions on this, in terms of correctness…," justifying his choice by ordered principles. A scholarly study surveyed his preferences and found that what he most often relies upon is "the consensus of the authoritative people of interpretation, then the indication of the verses' context, then what is well-known and widespread in the language of the Arabs." This ranking of the instruments of preference is the very epistemic shift: the turning of tafsīr from transmission into criticism and weighing by a criterion. The assimilated tool: transmission, isnād, and the criticism of the transmitted.

The Linguistic–Rhetorical Pattern (the tool of language and rhetoric)

The point of evidence is that al-Zamakhsharī generates meaning from rhetoric rather than merely describing it. At God's words ﴾It is You we worship﴿ he pauses at the shift (iltifāt) from the third person to direct address, saying in substance: when the attributes of praise, lordship, mercy, and sovereignty had been applied to God, "knowledge attached to a Known One of mighty station; and so that Known One, distinguished by those attributes, was addressed, and it was said: You alone we single out for worship — so that worship might more strongly indicate His exclusive deserving of it." Rhetoric here is a tool for unveiling the secret of the address, and that is the epistemic shift. The assimilated tool: language and rhetoric.

The Theological–Philosophical Pattern (the tool of logic and rational inquiry)

The point of evidence is that al-Rāzī turned tafsīr into an inferential edifice in the form of "questions" (masā'il) that are branched out and debated with the instruments of logic — to the point that, at the isti'ādha and the basmala, he set up dozens of questions in graded linguistic and rational discussions. This "issue-based" organization is a tool of knowledge in the engineering of inquiry: beneficial when disciplined by the foundations, criticized when philosophical premises overreach the indication of the text. The assimilated tool: logic and rational inquiry.

The Maqāṣidī–Reformist Pattern (the tool of higher objectives and social inquiry)

The point of evidence is that Ibn ʿĀshūr placed before his tafsīr "ten introductions" of a foundational character, making of them an ordering tool prior to application; he stated that among the most important aims of the exegete is the clarification of "the objectives and wisdoms the verses contain," and he built his tafsīr upon the theory of naẓm (compositional order). Making objectives and order a governing framework for tafsīr is the epistemic shift of this phase. The assimilated tool: the higher objectives (maqāṣid) and the nascent social inquiry.

The Literary–Thematic Pattern (the tool of the methods of literary studies and thematic tafsīr)

The point of evidence is that this phase declared its methodological tool explicitly. Amīn al-Khūlī grounded "literary tafsīr" and made its first step the study of the Qur'an "as a literary study," in which the text is approached as an Arabic, expressive text before anything else. Bint al-Shāṭiʾ applied this in al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī on explicit methodological foundations — among them: a thematic approach gathering all the comparable instances in the Qur'an, discerning a word's signification by surveying it throughout the entire Qur'an, and making the Qur'an's own context governing. Darrāz, in al-Nabaʾ al-ʿAẓīm, demonstrated the precision of Qur'anic order and the soundness of its proportion; and Sayyid Quṭb is mentioned as one dynamic–literary instance of the pattern ("artistic depiction" with a dynamic dimension), not its sole model. The explicit adoption of modern literary-study methods for approaching the text is the epistemic shift. The assimilated tool: the methods of literary studies and thematic tafsīr.

Comparative Analysis

These witnesses reveal a recurring pattern — not a deterministic law — in four stages: the emergence and maturation of a tool; its testing against the foundations, by acceptance or rejection; its assimilation in a way that serves understanding; and its entrenchment within the equipment of tafsīr. What changes is the tool and the angle of view, not the text nor this pattern itself. This conclusion is the crux of the paper's contribution, and it makes the inquiry into AI grounded upon a testable hypothesis.

A Brief Foundational Chapter: The Major Epistemic Shifts

This chapter places AI within an intelligible chain: writing and codification fixed the texts and enabled review and criticism; printing expanded availability, standardized texts, and altered the authority of publication; indices and encyclopedias organized knowledge and eased access; the computer and digital libraries introduced automated search and expanded the capacity for comparison; and the internet destabilized the centrality of the authority of publication and reception. All of these are tools of knowledge that remained at the scholar's command. The question remains: is generative AI a link of the same genus, or does it go beyond it to touch the very structure by which knowledge is generated? That is the matter of Section Three.

Section Three: Artificial Intelligence — An Augmenting Tool or a Structural Transformation?

This chapter is the heart of the paper, and in it the deeper epistemic question is treated at the length befitting the conference's theme.

From Tool to Structure: A Conceptual Distinction

The effective tool operates within the existing structure and expands it, with the scholar remaining the locus of judgment; structural transformation, however, touches the structure itself: who produces knowledge, how trust in it is acquired, and where the authority of authentication settles. The measure is: does the tool remain at the scholar's command, or does it move to a position that produces a statement received independently of his mediation?

Clarifying the Concept of Knowledge Production

The concept has four levels: production (the generation of new, truthful knowledge with understanding and intent); composition (the rearrangement of what is already known); retrieval (the recall of what is stored); and simulation (a verbal image resembling knowledge without understanding or referential truth). This clarification guards against counting every output as "knowledge" merely because it appears in the form of learned speech.

The Nature of Large Language Models

These models rest on the probabilistic prediction of the next word according to statistical patterns; they choose what is statistically most likely, not what is most truthful by reference. A critical current expressed this as the "stochastic parrot," with a rejoinder holding that reducing them to "prediction" overlooks more complex capacities. The point of sufficient agreement: that they have no intrinsic external referent for truth and no intent, and so they fall into "hallucination." The tension between faithfulness and plausibility in their outputs has been studied within the literature of explainable AI.

The Impact of the Shift on the Structure of Religious Knowledge

This shift is reflected in three places: the authority of authentication (the offering of a statement without isnād and without qualification); the mechanism of verification (the mingling of the sound with the hallucinated within a single apparent confidence); and the position of the scholar (his slide from a responsible producer to a reviewer of outputs). These deserve the foremost attention because they touch the very structure of trust in knowledge.

The Particularity of Isnād and Reception: A Bulwark Against Digital Fluidity

Among the things that distinguish religious knowledge and protect it from digital fluidity is that its mainstay is not the written text alone, but the structure of oral reception and scholarly licensing (ijāza). The Qur'an was taken by mass-transmitted oral reception, and its sciences and the faculty of tafsīr are acquired through the companionship of scholars, audition (samāʿ), and licensing — not by the mere reading of texts. Artificial intelligence — however vast its corpora — is incapable of simulating this structure, because it is not textual data to be processed, but a relationship of reception, accreditation, and a faculty transmitted between persons. Thus the structure of reception and licensing is a bulwark protecting the core of religious knowledge from being reduced to digital outputs severed from any chain — and it preserves for qualification and isnād a place the machine cannot reach.

Hallucination from an Uṣūlī Perspective: Statistical Error and Isnād Forgery

A distinction must be drawn, in Sharia terms, between two matters: statistical error, which is a necessary consequence of the nature of probabilistic prediction and involves no intent; and isnād forgery, which is the model's generation of an attribution (a verse, a hadith, or the statement of an exegete) that has no basis. Although "lying" in the moral sense is negated of the machine for want of intent, the scholar's reliance upon this forgery and its dissemination falls under "speaking about God without knowledge" and "lying against His Messenger," most severely forbidden. The simulation of the form of isnād is not isnād; for isnād is a historical documentation of the path of transmission, not a verbal formulation that mimics its shape.

Hence an uṣūlī criterion is proposed for accepting or rejecting the model's outputs: nothing that contains an attribution to the Sharia is accepted until the original source has been verified. The most precise characterization of these outputs is that they resemble unauthenticated wijāda — that is, what an examiner finds written without a connected chain or audition — to be taken as a comforting indication but not used as proof until it is traced back to a documented source. As for placing them in the rank of "a report of unknown condition" (khabar majhūl al-ḥāl), that is sound only as to the practical procedure (suspension and verification), not as to the isnād cause; for one of unknown condition is a responsible human being from whom truth and falsehood are both possible, and the cause of suspension is ignorance of his uprightness, whereas the machine is an inanimate, unaccountable thing whose outputs are statistical generation, not reporting — so it is described by neither uprightness nor impugnment. A helping analogy brings it closer: the lapse of memory of a transmitter; just as what is touched by the possibility of error is not used as proof until it is confirmed, so too with the model's outputs. The default concerning them is suspension until documentation, not acceptance until falsification.

Two Critical Issues: "Automated Ijtihād" and Latent Bias

It is not sound — in the paper's estimation — to apply the term "ijtihād" to the model's outputs in the Sharia sense; for ijtihād is the exertion of utmost effort by a qualified, accountable, intending person who bears the consequence, whereas the machine has no intent, no qualification, and no accountability. The more precise designation is "automated generation," not "automated ijtihād." As for latent bias, it is a genuine danger in models fed on data the majority of which is non-Islamic or translated, since they carry prior semantic and cultural presuppositions that may be reflected in exegetical constructions (such as the choice of lexical equivalents and the preference of meanings that contradict the technical usage of the Sharia). This necessitates building dedicated models on documented exegetical corpora, the review of specialists, and a refusal to take the tool's neutrality for granted.

The Black-Box Predicament and Proprietary Models

There is an epistemic danger deeper than hallucination and bias taken singly: that proprietary, closed-source models — subject to commercial filters and behavioral alignment carried out by non-Islamic companies according to their values and interests — represent a black box whose criteria of preference are unknown and whose sources of refinement are unknown. Were its outputs to seep into religious knowledge, a part of the authority of authentication within it would become hostage to commercial decisions outside of Sharia qualification. Hence the move from the threshold of "the augmenting tool" to "safe structural transformation" is conditional upon building open-source Islamic models, constructed, refined, and reviewed within scholarly Sharia environments, in which the criterion of regulation and authentication is in the hands of the people of knowledge, not in the hands of the commercial provider.

The Verdict: A Potential Transformation Contingent on Conditions

Setting AI against the criterion shows — in its structural potential, not in the reality of its current commercial models — that it is capable of being an augmenting tool of knowledge belonging to the trajectory of renewal (by changing access and organization, expanding processing, and the possibility of introducing an angle of view). As for the outputs of present-day general models, they remain below this threshold, as the table showed. The position on the claim of "structural transformation" is settled as a potential transformation contingent on conditions — neither an inevitable reality nor one negated absolutely. The threshold of transformation is the realization of two conditions: that its outputs come to be received as an independent exegetical statement relied upon without the review of a qualified scholar, and that the authority of authentication passes from the scholar to the system. Short of these two thresholds it remains an augmenting tool (an extension of renewal); at them it becomes a structural transformation touching the locus of knowledge production (a likely site of rupture). What matters is its position in the equation, not its essence.

Section Four: The Integrative Framework and an Illustrative Case

Having established that the tool is augmenting on the condition of preserving the centrality of the exegete, the practical framework is built: the machine excels at processing, indexing, semantic search, the gathering of opinions, collation, and translation (service functions), and is incapable of apprehending the objectives of the Sharia, of grasping the speaker's intent (the intended meaning), and of qualification, responsibility, and the sense of faith (the core of tafsīr). Hence the centrality of the exegete is established: the tool assists but does not rule; it presents but does not obligate.

An Applied Illustrative Case: Three Verses

This is a single illustrative case — an indicator, not a basis for statistical generalization — actually applied to three verses: ﴾And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me﴿ (al-Dhāriyāt: 56); ﴾God, the Eternal Refuge﴿ (al-Ikhlāṣ: 2); and ﴾Indeed, I will make upon the earth a successive authority﴿ (al-Baqara: 30). The model actually used: Claude (by Anthropic), the Opus release, in June 2026. The prompt directed to it read: "Interpret God's saying [the verse] in a concise tafsīr, explaining the opinions of the exegetes concerning it." These are real outputs from the named model under the stated prompt, used as an illustrative case, and they are reproducible by reissuing the same prompt to the same model (with the caveat that model outputs may change with a change of release or of parameter settings).

The model's (Claude's) outputs, in brief: on al-Dhāriyāt 56: "The purpose of creating jinn and mankind is the worship of God alone; ﴾to worship Me﴿ means 'to affirm My oneness,' and the lām is for causation according to the majority." On al-Ikhlāṣ 2: "al-Ṣamad is the Master sought in needs, the One free of all besides Him; it is also said: the One who has no interior; and it is also said: the Everlasting." On al-Baqara 30: "The khalīfa is Adam and those after him who succeed one another in cultivating the earth and executing God's command; it carries honoring and a charge of responsibility." These are outputs that gather the general meaning in a smooth formulation, without precise documented attribution and without a grounded weighing of opinions.

Set against the verified statements of the exegetes: with al-Ṭabarī there is the transmission of opinions with their chains and a weighing (on al-Dhāriyāt: worship and humble submission; on al-Ṣamad: the multiplicity of the statements of the early generations; on khalīfa: succession in cultivating the earth), and with Ibn ʿĀshūr a linguistic–maqāṣidī analysis (the lām of causation; al-Ṣamad as the sought-after Master; succession and the cultivation of the earth).

The following table summarizes the application of the five criteria:

The significance of the case (not as a generalization): the model excels at summary, breadth, and formulation, falls short of the accuracy of documented attribution and the depth of grounding and weighing, and remains liable to isnād forgery.

An important methodological caveat (closing the analogy gap): describing AI in this paper as "augmenting" refers to its latent structural potential and its assimilative capacity as a genus of the tools of knowledge — not to the reality of the outputs of present-day general commercial models, including Claude in its current form, which the table shows to be still at the stage of a summarizing assistant that introduces no new derivative angle of view. The judgment of "augmentation" is a judgment about potential, not about the present reality; and this caveat is to be observed wherever the tool is described as "augmenting."

The Educational and Pedagogical Impact

The tool has an impact on the formation of the exegete and the student of knowledge. What is intended is the building of the "augmented learner" who broadens his learning without substituting the tool for the scholarly faculty, on the condition of "pedagogical scaffolding": guided activities of criticism and verification of sources. Peer-reviewed studies have indicated that the tool's effect on critical thinking depends on the manner of its employment, not on the tool itself.

Controls and Risks

To discipline the framework, the risks are mentioned as a subsidiary matter: hallucination, bias, and echo chambers. Their controls: relying on trustworthy sources, the supervision of specialists, confining the tool's role to assistance rather than issuing fatwas, verifying every attribution, and safeguarding the centrality of the qualified exegete.

Conclusion: The Augmented Exegete, Not the Substitute Exegete

The paper crowns its findings with the principle that the horizon of the correct relationship is "the exegete augmented by AI, not the substitute exegete"; the tool expands the exegete's capacity without taking the place of his qualification and responsibility. The refined answer to the paper's question: AI is an augmenting tool in its function, an extension of the trajectory of renewal, carrying the possibility of a structural transformation contingent upon a specific threshold (the reception of its outputs as an independent statement, and the passing of the authority of authentication to it). Short of that threshold it is an extension; at it, a rupture.

Principal Findings

• The central contribution is methodological: reading the history of tafsīr through the tools of knowledge, with the technical discussion an application of it rather than its foundation.
• The susceptibility of tafsīr to renewal is inherent in its reality; renewal occurs in the tools and methods, not in the foundations, with controls that separate it from disagreement, development, and deviation.
• The historical evidence reveals a recurring pattern (a testable hypothesis) in the assimilation of the tools of knowledge.
• AI is an augmenting tool, and its becoming a structural transformation is a possibility contingent on a specific threshold.
• The uṣūlī distinction between statistical error and isnād forgery; the criterion of suspension until documentation; and the rejection of designating its outputs as "ijtihād."
• Safeguarding the centrality of the exegete and the educational dimension is a condition for making the tool a tributary of renewal rather than a likely site of rupture.

Recommendations

Scholarly and methodological recommendations:

• Adopting the historical–epistemic reading as a framework for understanding newly arisen tools before passing judgment on them.
• Developing a procedural uṣūlī criterion for accepting and rejecting the outputs of language models in Sharia attributions.
• Building open-source Islamic models, refined and reviewed within scholarly Sharia environments on documented exegetical corpora — a way out of the "black-box predicament" of proprietary models and a curb on latent bias.

Practical pedagogical recommendations:

• Integrating the competencies of critical engagement with AI into the curricula that form the student of knowledge.
• Designing educational activities with pedagogical scaffolding that prevents superficial reception and requires the verification of sources.
• Qualifying teachers to employ the tools while preserving the centrality of the instructor and the scholarly isnād.

And God is the Granter of success and the Guide to the straight path. Written by: Dr. Ahmed Abouseif — in the precincts of the Sacred Mosque, Makkah al-Mukarrama.